


force

by lufairchild



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Angst, Consensual Non-Consent, Desire, Discussion of non-sexual nonconsent (i.e. pretty much everything Hannibal canonically does to Will), Dom/sub, First Time, M/M, Mentions of violence and cannibalism consistent with canon, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Relationship Development, Will has an unorthodox opinion about how sexuality works, queerness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:35:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27105820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lufairchild/pseuds/lufairchild
Summary: In fighting back, Will becomes, every day, more like Hannibal.
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 11
Kudos: 117





	force

**Author's Note:**

> so I wasn't entirely sure whether to include the noncon warning for this fic, mostly because Will repeatedly and directly gives Hannibal permission to have sex with him. but the fic is also about how Hannibal has consistently disregarded consent in his relationship with Will in terms of Will's bodily and mental autonomy--he violates Will's boundaries repeatedly in canon. plus do be warned that they engage in this fic in a fantasy of Will being sexually forced, and they don't use a safeword. if you're okay with how the show deals with violence and consent and you're okay with that stuff being taken into an explicitly sexual realm, I think you'll be all right, but please take care of yourselves, and let me know if I can add any tags that would be helpful. <3 - lu
> 
> \--
> 
> Note: This fic is part of the Mystery Dissertation Project, an experimental Ph.D. dissertation that combines academic writing, a mystery novel, and fanfiction. The fic you'll find posted under this username is (supposedly) by one of the characters in the mystery novel, Lu Fairchild; it explores questions of consent, vulnerability, desire, and the complicated relationship between what we read and write and what we actually want and/or approve of in real life. If you're interested in learning more about the Mystery Dissertation Project, check out its [website.](https://mysterydissertationproject.home.blog) Any questions and feedback are more than welcome!

Most mediums speak with the dead. Will Graham speaks with their killers.

That is what he is, Hannibal thinks, watching Will’s eyes move rapidly back and forth under his closed eyelids, beneath thin pale skin with blue-branching veins that Hannibal wants to trace with his fingernail. Will Graham is a medium. He opens his body like a conduit and lets the words and thoughts and deeds of others pour out. He channels bloodspatter and broken glass and arcing knives. Hannibal imagines the insides of his brain, capillaries and secret chambers, tinged dark red in the light of somebody else’s violence. Will calls up the spirits of the vicious and the depraved, ushering them back into the scenes of trauma they have made. Will conjures murder.

He has, Hannibal thinks, the same translucence as the sheeted ghostly figures in nineteenth-century spirit photographs, as if his contact with the intangible traces of those not present has left him half-opaque himself. Will is enormously strong, to contain these killers within him, and yet he is patently vulnerable, smudged-bruised shadows under his eyes, curls like a girl’s, twitches and trembles in his forehead and fingers. Hannibal wants to place his thumb into the hollow at Will’s white throat and press until red rises up to meet it.

—

Hannibal watches Will channel _him_ —watches Will close his eyes and make pronouncements about the copycat killer, about the Chesapeake Ripper. About Hannibal.

Hannibal’s thoughts course through Will’s brain. His words fill up the hollows of Will’s cheeks and spill out of Will’s mouth. Will’s nightmares are garish with razor-sharp antlers and weapons piercing flesh. Will’s mind is blurring at the edges as Hannibal invades him slowly, secretly, under cover of night. He is losing himself in Hannibal, though he doesn’t yet know it.

Eyes unfocused, trembling, Will seizes in Hannibal’s dining room. Hannibal lies to him. Hannibal smoothes back his hair and clasps his glistening forehead, clinically, gently. Hannibal sends him out into the snow with a gun.

Hannibal inserts a rubber tube down Will’s throat. A tunnel, a passage, a surgical opening of the entrance to hell. Abigail’s ear shoved down the chute. She is a willing sacrifice, a sacrifice for Will. He consumes this synecdochical offering, this portion of their surrogate child, now truly flesh of their flesh, bone of their bone. Hannibal forces her down Will’s throat and now they are both in Will’s blood.

—

Will fights back.

—

In fighting back, Will becomes a killer. Will manipulates, deceives, worms and wriggles his way deep under Hannibal’s skin, a parasite Hannibal does not know how to extract. In fighting back, Will kills and sculpts a man who believes he is a monster into the monster of all their dreams. In fighting back, Will becomes, every day, more like Hannibal.

—

In the moonlight, blood looks black. Will, in the moonlight, streaked in blood, is beautiful.

“It’s beautiful,” he whispers, and the miracle has been accomplished. Hannibal’s thoughts, in Will’s brain, coming out of Will’s mouth. Beautiful.

Both of them drip blood, their own and the Great Red Dragon’s. They grip at each other. _Flesh of my flesh._

Hannibal knows what Will is about to do just before he does it. Long enough to stop it, if he wanted to. Long enough to wrench himself away, split them down the middle. It wouldn’t be precise, now, not surgical, not clean. But he could do it. Sever them in two with a bloody ragged wound, and watch his other half fall into the sea.

But he doesn’t.

—

And they fall into the deep. And hell spits them back up.

—

—

—

“Why won’t you touch me?”

Sunlight streams through the French doors, painting the stone floor of their villa blinding white. Will is half in, half out, one hand resting on the glass as he looks across their balcony to the impossible aquamarine clarity of the Mediterranean waters. He turns to Hannibal, and his green-blue eyes mirror the sea.

Hannibal pauses over the sprig of rosemary he is chopping into fine fragrant segments and lays down his knife.

He doesn’t feign misunderstanding. He knows what kind of touch Will means.

“Because you don’t want me to.”

Something incredulous, a bitter little laugh, makes itself known in the startled twitch at the edge of Will’s mouth. It is a suppressed sound Hannibal has become familiar with in these last six months. As Will’s wounds healed, even as his hands fell once more into the old patterns of tying fishhooks and fixing boats and his shoulders relaxed and he accepted, sometimes with pleasure, whatever Hannibal fed him, there grew a strain of bitterness that Hannibal can now smell like copper on Will’s skin. It is the one part of Will he still cannot not understand.

“When have you ever set boundaries for yourself based on what I want?”

Hannibal tilts his head and considers. His answer, he knows, is calculated, but it is also true. “I have always believed I was doing what you wanted. You were simply unwilling to embrace those desires.”

Will neither argues nor agrees. “You have always been certain you know my own mind better than me. But you’re wrong, for once.”

Hannibal frowns. “What am I wrong about, Will?”

“I do want you to touch me.”

Hannibal finds himself taken aback that Will is continuing this line of conversation. He had assumed it was one of those abstract hypothetical questions meant to propel them into deeper waters.

“No,” Hannibal says. “You don’t.”

Will’s gaze sets. Hannibal knows that determination, that stubbornness, so well. Knows, intimately, the twinge it produces in his chest; knows all the ways he has tenderly, mercilessly, meticulously bent it into more suitable shapes.

“You are not aroused by me, Will. You are aroused by women.”

For a moment, Will looks out at the sea again, and he is still beautiful, framed against the cloudless blue sky and the waving green palm fronds reaching up from the brown ceramic pots Hannibal bought at the local market. Will’s dark hair is long again, curling loose around his ears. He looks both more and less fragile than he did all those months, years, ago when Hannibal watched him shut his eyes in heartless midwestern fields and let other people’s violence play across his closed eyelids. He is less pale now, but the thin branching lines around the corners of his eyes attest to a bone-deep weariness Hannibal fears he will never shake.

“I have never been interested in taking people by force, Will. You should know that.”

Will looks at him sharply. The old light is still there in his eyes, however lined their edges have become. “Not sexually, you mean.”

Hannibal inclines his head.

“Because in every other way, you know, you have taken people by force. Taken me by force.”

Hannibal considers. “Well. It is a crude way of putting it, perhaps…”

“You forced a tube down my throat and shoved Abigail’s ear into my stomach. You gave me seizures and lied about my medical diagnosis. You tried to open up my head and stick your hand inside my brain, first as my psychiatrist and then with a chainsaw. You almost convinced me I was a killer.”

“You are a killer.”

“Well, I might not have been, if you hadn’t interfered.” He holds up a hand as Hannibal opens his mouth. “I don’t mean spiritually, or psychologically, or whatever. I mean that I might have gone through life _without killing anyone_. I don’t know. I’ll never know. Because you ignored the fact that I wanted desperately, terribly, to never kill anyone, and twisted all the parts of me that were capable of violence until they broke free of my control and became actions.”

The stone table is cold as Hannibal places his hands on it and rises to his feet. He moves slower these days, thanks to the Great Red Dragon’s claws.

“Will.”

Will turns his face to Hannibal’s, mulish, hands stiff at his sides. “I want you to kiss me.”

Hannibal is caught, for one-eighth of a second, off his guard. Then he says, smoothly, stepping closer, “No. You don’t.”

“I do. I want you to fuck me, too.”

Hannibal winces at the language. “You don’t, Will.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do. I know your mind and body as well as you know them yourself. I know your aches and pains, your appetites, your craving for saltwater fish and the echoes of your nightmares in the tremble of your hands. I know when your blood rises with desire, Will, and I do not make it rise.”

Will says nothing, but continues to look at Hannibal as Hannibal approaches.

“Surely you don’t think this is some sort of requirement,” Hannibal says, the thought occurring to him with a sour taste that floods his mouth. “That I would expect such a thing of you, if we are to continue as we are.”

Will rolls his eyes, and Hannibal feels the tension leave his shoulders. “I’m not an idiot. That’s not what I’m saying."

“Well, then?”

Will shakes his head, frustrated, curls rustling against his beautiful forehead. “I told you. I want it.”

Hannibal steps closer, and they are face to face. “ _Will_.”

Will looks at him in challenge and defiance. Hannibal can smell him so clearly, so sharply: sweat tinged with garlic from last night’s meal, water from the bay dried into his hair, breath that needs a toothbrush, and frustration, radiating off of him in waves. Nothing else.

Hannibal grasps Will by the back of his neck and pulls their mouths together. He allows himself just a small amount of pleasure as he slides his tongue deep into Will’s throat, just a tiny bit of satisfaction as he lets his hand rest on Will’s chest. But he keeps himself firmly in control, and when he steps back, he looks Will up and down coolly, seeing exactly what he expects.

“You don’t want this, Will.”

Will’s breath is slightly accelerated, but only due to the briefly restricted access to air. His cheeks have not pinkened. His pupils have not widened.

“You’re _wrong_ ,” Will says again, as Hannibal turns away, and a desperate edge to his words makes Hannibal turn back. “My _body_ doesn’t want it. But I do. So _make my body want you_ , Hannibal.” There is a cracked note in his voice as he says, “You’ve made it do everything else you wanted.”

The pause that follows is, to Hannibal, like the clear ringing that follows a fork tapping a glass, absolutely pure and so sharp it is nearly possible to sense the eardrums quiver in response. Hannibal feels it cut cleanly through him, deep into his bones. It is almost a moment of unadulterated understanding—that perfect rush of intimacy when Will’s mind pulls back, just for a moment, its eyelid-like shell to reveal the soul beneath—except that it brings with it a vicious twist of desire that pollutes the onrush of clarity. Hannibal once reveled in the imagined sounds of Will screaming, bathed in them like he bathes in a masterfully executed _coloratura_ or _cadenza_ , and though these imaginings were tainted with bitterness Hannibal has never felt that his desire for violence, against Will or anyone else, was sullied by the sadism of the garden-variety killer in thrall to his libido. Hannibal is a sophisticated murderer. That is not a boast; it is simply a fact. When it comes to sex, Hannibal needs nothing more forceful than seduction.

So the stab of arousal that comes when Hannibal pictures himself _making Will’s body want him is_ …disturbing.

Will cannot be seduced. Not in the way Alana could, so naive despite herself, nor in the way Bedelia could, every moment knowing better and letting herself be pulled into Hannibal’s wake anyway.

“Well?” Will asks. His mouth is set. He is waiting for Hannibal to respond.

“You want me to strip you of your clothes. Put you on your back, perhaps, or on your belly like a beast. Mount you. Spend myself inside you. All while you remain limp and unmoved.”

“I want you,” Will says, “to move me.”

Low heat burns at the back of Hannibal’s throat. “It will not be comfortable.”

Will laughs. It is, Hannibal thinks, genuinely mirthful.

“I don’t much care for comfort.”

—

When Hannibal first stalked Will he did it gradually, carefully, in tiny movements and sudden lavish gestures, cautious paces forward and the occasional brazen overstep he guessed Will would tolerate. But Will did not know, then, that Hannibal was reshaping him into the person Hannibal wanted him to be. Hannibal can play the long game—better than anyone, except perhaps Will. But he thinks the time for that is over now. Will is more than willing to be overwhelmed by Hannibal. He is no longer a startled deer poised to run away.

So Hannibal overwhelms him quickly.

He starts with his fingers in Will’s asshole. A stupid man would start with kisses, with an attempt to coax desire through familiar acts, ones comparable to those Will already likes. Hannibal begins with precisely that thing most alien to Will, the one for which he is least prepared. The one that is most intrusive. The one that will change him the most.

Will crouches on hands and knees, face bent to the pillow, pale ass thrust into the air. Hannibal coats his fingers with a silky lube his first Italian lover used on him in his Venetian palazzo, wine-red curtains pulled back to let in the streaming sun. Hannibal has used it exclusively since, because of its impeccable quality and perhaps because of some slight, uncharacteristic sliver of nostalgia. He presses his finger against the tight, dark bud of Will’s asshole, sliding the lube into its wrinkled folds and through the black hair that covers it. Will’s body is tensed. His penis is quite limp. Hannibal’s is not yet hard, but only because he is making sure of it, pushing against his arousal with the back of his mind.

“It is really quite astonishing, what the body can do,” Hannibal says conversationally. He can feel his own pulse in his thumb against Will’s asshole. “The ways it can contort itself, stretch and bend and reassemble itself, even as it is screaming out that it cannot.”

“I know.” Will’s voice is tighter than usual. “I was there for all of it.”

“Not all of it,” Hannibal corrects. “I had a life before you knew me.”

“So did I.”

Hannibal digs his thumbnail slightly into the tender skin just inside the rim of Will’s hole. “The anus is not meant to open very wide, but it can. It can be easily torn, of course, but if one is careful, it can stretch far beyond what ought to be its limits.”

“I know how anal penetration works,” Will replies, a hint of annoyance in his voice. “I once profiled a killer who left wine bottles sticking out of the backsides of his victims.”

“Juvenile,” Hannibal cannot help but say.

“Yes. He was.”

Hannibal slides his thumb down into Will’s asshole, just until he meets real resistance. Only the tip makes it inside.

He can feel the rush of Will’s blood beneath his tender skin. Will’s pulse is elevated. His muscles are tense. He is alternating between bracing himself and trying not to.

“You wanted me to make your body want you, Will,” he says. It is getting harder to set aside his own arousal, the thick insistence of it pressing against the barriers he has erected. “That may or may not be possible, but I can certainly make it _change_ for me.”

He presses in farther. Will swallows convulsively. His asshole tightens against the intrusion. Hannibal does not stop, not until he is knuckle-deep.

“Your body will make space for me,” Hannibal says. He cannot keep the threat from his voice, is not sure he wants to. “Whether it wants me or not, it will open up for me. It will let me inside. It always has before.”

Hannibal slides the tip of his thumb in and out, loosening Will’s muscle. There is still no scent of desire on him. It is impossible to pretend that Hannibal is not aroused by its absence.

He _will_ make Will want him.

“You are maddened by the one remaining way you continue to reject me,” Hannibal says, pushing deeper. “That’s it, isn’t it, Will? The Great Red Dragon was supposed to make it all go away. All the cloying, suffocating guilt, all the petty concerns of ordinary humans, all the last drips of social niceties that kept you from embracing who you really were. And from embracing me.”

“Yes,” Will breathes.

“Your body refuses to cooperate. To merge with me, in every way.”

“Yes.”

“Then I shall force it to,” Hannibal says, and plunges his thumb all the way in. Will cries out. His walls are so hot, so tight, trying with every ounce of strength to expel Hannibal. Hannibal does not move.

“Is it uncomfortable?” Hannibal asks. Will nods. “Does it hurt?” Will nods again. Hannibal presses deeper, pushing the pad of his thumb against the dark hot space inside of Will.

Will lets out a noise of pain through gritted teeth.

“The pain is what means it is working,” Hannibal says calmly. “It is otherwise irrelevant. I will not stop, Will. Your body can send out as many signals of panic and fear to your brain as it wants, but that will not change the fact that it will let me in.”

Will lets out another noise, not quite of pain, not entirely.

“Your body will make space for me,” Hannibal says, “whether it wants to or not,” and he pulls out his thumb and replaces it immediately with two slick fingers.

“No,” Will breathes, and for a second Hannibal pauses.

“Will?”

“You told me,” Will says, enunciating through the strain in his voice, “you wouldn’t stop.”

Hannibal can smell the dank, intimate scent of Will’s asshole on his glistening thumb. His cock is half hard in his pants. “You told me you wanted this.”

“God damn it, Hannibal,” Will grits out, “fucking _force me_ already.”

So this is what Will needs. To protest, still, despite it all. To say he doesn’t want Hannibal inside him, doesn’t want to be the thing he has already become, the two-headed beast, the monster with the bloody mouth, the thing that Hannibal made him. And he wants Hannibal to deny him his last, final attempt to escape.

Hannibal darts his head lizard-like downward and sinks his teeth into the flesh of Will’s ass. Will shouts. Hannibal pulls back just before he breaks the skin, leaving mottled purple toothmarks behind.

Hannibal pulls his fingers out, fast, and unbuttons his pants, pushing them and his underwear down around his thighs. He strokes himself a few times, cock standing out hard and glistening, and then aims it and pushes home.

“ _No_ ,” Will gasps out, “oh, fuck, no, fuck that hurts—”

Hannibal pulls almost all the way out and then pushes, hard, back in.

“Christ,” Will says, voice thin with pain, “please don’t, Hannibal—”

Hannibal thrusts again. He bends over Will, breath hot against Will’s ear as he whispers, “Do you feel it? Do you feel your body opening up for me?”

“No,” Will protests, “no, no, I don’t want it—”

“Liar,” Hannibal hisses, and bites the flesh of Will’s ear. Will cries out. Hannibal drinks in the sound, the frenzied animal part of him rising to its call even as Hannibal keeps it in check. “Liar,” he says again, and fucks into Will, and there is something so, _so_ sweet about breaching this last, final barrier, a heady rush like shots of hundred-year-old liquor straight down Hannibal’s throat, no careful maneuvering, no playing a masterful game of chess, no coaxing Will’s claws out one by one—just pure unadulterated force, wanting Will and _taking him._

“No,” Will is babbling, quieter now, “no no no no no,” but Hannibal can smell it, the thin pungent sliver of Will’s desire rising between each denial, and he digs his fingernails into Will’s skin, pushes his wrists against the bed and fucks him harder.

“Yes,” Hannibal breathes. “Yes, Will. You want me.”

“I don’t,” Will says, but weakly.

“You always have.”

Will shakes his head. Firmer now. And maybe that, at least, is true. Maybe he is right.

“You want me _now_.”

“Yes,” Will whispers, and Hannibal comes, shooting his spunk into Will’s asshole, into the space he has made inside of this fragile, unkillable creature. Hannibal palms Will’s cock as he pants, and Will is not going to come just yet but there is blood there, stiffening him, and Hannibal feels Will’s pulse through his burning skin as he squeezes tight.

Will sinks facedown into the bed as Hannibal pulls out. Hannibal fingers Will’s asshole. A little bit of semen leaks out. He bends down and licks it up. Will’s body startles as Hannibal begins to lap at Will, licking and sucking away the taste of himself until only Will’s skin, slightly sour, remains.

Hannibal raises himself up till he is even with Will and then turns Will over onto his stomach. Will’s face is bright red. His eyes are dazed. He blinks up at Hannibal, beautiful eyelashes fluttering.

“I am going to have you every day,” Hannibal says fiercely and tenderly. “Every day, as much as I want.”

“All of me,” Will says. His voice is hoarse. “You want all of me.”

Hannibal bends his head and kisses Will on the mouth. “Yes,” he says, lips brushing Will’s.

“Take it,” Will says.

Hannibal kisses him again. “I already have.”


End file.
